The next release of ASP.NET promises many improvements
for Web developers, not the least of which is a better
chance of sleeping at night without nightmares of base64-encoded
data flowing across their Web farms. With a more compact
serialization format, a partitioning between behavioral
and UI state, and smart interaction with data-bound controls
and declarative data sources, those view-state nightmares
just might become sweet dreams.

For the fan of pre-built controls, ASP.NET 2.0 provides
a number of rich controls that form the foundation for
feature-rich Web applications. Components like the TreeView
and Wizard are actually comprehensive services that the
ASP.NET runtime makes available to Web pages.